John F. Kennedy was killed a few years before I was born, so I do not remember that tragic November day in Dallas. I never heard the news on the radio or saw Walter Cronkite announce it to the public on the evening news. Unlike so many of my relatives or so many of the teachers that I had, I could never point to that day as a milestone and remember exactly where I was or what I was doing.
While I had been witness to a number of disturbing events in American history -- Nixon's resignation, the death of John Lennon, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Persian Gulf war -- I always considered such notions of cultural sympathy as so much rhetoric. Until last week. I will always remember September 11.
I run the writing center and teach at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, N.Y. The suburban campus is about a two-hour drive down the Long Island Expressway from the city, although Manhattan often seems a world away. As I pulled into the parking lot that day, I remember the radio interruption and the news reporter's account of the first plane crash into the World Trade Center.
At the time, it sounded like some bizarre airline disaster, some gross miscalculation or some unusual mechanical failure that would be explained later on. When I walked into the college writing center, the tutors were already talking about it. No sooner had students started to file in when one of the tutors' husbands called with news of the second plane and talk of a terrorist plot. I was talking to a student about errors in subject-verb agreement when a staff member at the center called to tell us that her husband was in the first building and that she would not be coming in. (He escaped before the building collapsed.)
With that phone call, the distance from Manhattan vanished, and the immediacy of the disaster came home. It was real. People that we knew were being affected. And before we could get over the shock of it all, we learned about the Pentagon attack.
Since we had no access to radio or television, except for a small black-and-white one down the hall with bad reception, and since we were unable to retrieve information from the Internet (we later learned that our Internet connection ran through lower Manhattan), we were forced to rely largely on the information of students or other professors who themselves were receiving word second- or third-hand.
"We're at war with Palestine," one student said.
"A plane crashed into the Empire State Building," another added.
"There's a plane headed for the White House," a third reported.
The hallways filled with confused professors, staff members, and students, all looking for information, all trying to make sense of the chaos. We huddled around a student in front of the doorway who was able to tune in a news station from his cell phone. The reporters seemed just as confused as we were.
Word began to circulate that classes would be canceled, a rumor that the administration soon confirmed. And as we started to pack up for the day, we heard that there were bombings all over Europe. In four hours, the world had gone insane.
Of course, most of these facts were erroneous. But cut off from more reliable sources of information and unable to see the reports firsthand, we could only assume that most or all of them were true. It was not until I listened to the news during the car ride home -- I had to take one of the main highways since the expressway had been reserved for emergency vehicles -- that I started to learn the horrifying truth of what had happened that day, a truth that would be slowly, painfully unearthed in the days to come: the missing, the injured, and the dead; the people who knew that they were going to die, the ones who died trying to save them, the ones who would have to live with their loss.
That night, I sat down to prepare for class with the television blaring in the background. After a while, the coverage seemed to blend into one tragic loop that just replayed itself over and over. And although there were moments that I wanted to turn it off, I simply could not. Every hour brought some new story, some new footage of the attack, some new estimation of the casualties and fatalities. So many people. I am not sure when I began to feel the dull thud behind my eyes, but it has been with me ever since. And preparation for the next day suddenly seemed so pointless.
I dreaded going in that Wednesday. How could I pretend that everything was fine? How could anyone? What could I say to the students? I had planned on examining the instability of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's Ligeia, but how could I talk about his instability after what had happened, after what we had all just witnessed and experienced? The world of Poe seemed almost sane by comparison. Normally, I liked to go into class with some outline of the day's assignment and some direction for the class's discussion. That day, I had none.
Professionalism generally upholds the importance of the job over personal concerns. In spite of whatever feelings you might be experiencing or distractions you might be facing, the job always takes precedence, and personal preoccupations should always take a backseat to performance and the task at hand.
But humanity demands the expression and acknowledgement of feeling over logic and analysis. We are not automatons, and, in certain situations, we need to give voice to our pain and suffering, to show our students that academic development is as much about sympathy, empathy, and insight as it is about reason, hypothesis, and deduction.
My heart was in my throat when I stood before them and started to speak. It was not business as usual, and to deny what had happened would be absurd. And so, instead of trying to lecture my students or dictate to them or ignore what we both were obviously feeling, I talked to them. And they talked to me.
We talked about the images we had seen, the planes, the people, the damage, the rescue efforts. We talked about who might have done it and why. We wondered what would happen next. Some disagreed about how the United States should retaliate. And shortly thereafter, we returned to Poe.
At one point, we laughed at the narrator's opium-induced contemplations and, perhaps for a brief moment, we even deluded ourselves into thinking that this was just another normal day. (That delusion quickly disappeared when the class ended and a student admitted that she feared for a friend who was in one of the buildings.) After all that had happened, it almost felt good to know that we could keep going. Perhaps by doing so, we were retaliating already.
And as I walked down the hallway that day, looking in on the other classrooms, I saw and heard pretty much the same thing: professors comforting students, students comforting professors, people reminding one another that they were not alone, people giving one another hope.
In spite of the fears and concerns and anxieties that we had, we would be back for one another tomorrow. And, hopefully, we, the professors, would complete our lesson plans and, for the most part, stay true to our course outlines. And, hopefully, our students would return to their class work and finish out the semester. And, hopefully, they would graduate and we would move on to teach other classes and other students. And, hopefully, we would put this nightmare behind us and move on with our lives. But we would never forget.
